Inner Demons - 8-bit wars comp entry

[jonza]

I stumbled upon this forum, and just had to register and participate in the 8-bit wars. Big thanks to qube and everyone else who is making this happen. It's been over 20 years since I last made a game, so I might be little rusty.

My game is going to be a story driven platformer about battling your inner demons... At least that is my excuse for using same lazily recolored sprites for all characters. Your player has three different 'mario style' sizes, and enemies maybe more.

I'm using Polyanna https://csdb.dk/release/?id=153091 for music. 5 extra channels for sound seems almost like cheating, but this tracker should actually run on real hardware. I'm only using 4 of the 8 channels anyway. At the moment i'm using QB64 for coding, but not sure if I'm sticking with that.

Oh yeah: i'm trying to make something that sounds and smells like a C-64 game.

[round157]

QB64, a popular software. Just like FreeBASIC. Good luck.....

[MrmediamanX]

you have until  Sunday March 31st 23:59:59 BST so there should be plenty of time left to build something.
also welcome to forums ... a home away from home.

[Qube]

He he, love the c64_bigguy.gif, reminds me of the Bruce Lee game

[STEVIE G]

I stumbled upon this forum, and just had to register and participate in the 8-bit wars. Big thanks to qube and everyone else who is making this happen. It's been over 20 years since I last made a game, so I might be little rusty.

My game is going to be a story driven platformer about battling your inner demons... At least that is my excuse for using same lazily recolored sprites for all characters. Your player has three different 'mario style' sizes, and enemies maybe more.

I'm using Polyanna https://csdb.dk/release/?id=153091 for music. 5 extra channels for sound seems almost like cheating, but this tracker should actually run on real hardware. I'm only using 4 of the 8 channels anyway. At the moment i'm using QB64 for coding, but not sure if I'm sticking with that.

Oh yeah: i'm trying to make something that sounds and smells like a C-64 game.

+1 for Tiny guy.  It'll keep your asset work to a minimum too.  Let's face it - most old 8bit games required you to fill in the blanks with your imagination 

[Xerra]

He he, love the c64_bigguy.gif, reminds me of the Bruce Lee game

This is exactly what I was thinking. That game is such a classic.

[Steve Elliott]

Welcome to the forum - good stuff.  Looking like a dark horse competition-wise.

[jonza]

He he, love the c64_bigguy.gif, reminds me of the Bruce Lee game

Me too. It's not intentional, but it's hard to unsee. Maybe I should include a power-up that makes you yellow and gives you karate

[jonza]

Some early gameplay video!



Many things are still missing, wrong or broken. Code is slow as hell and I think I'm getting a tendonitis to my wrist

[MrmediamanX]

ah man, that is cool. but it's best just use screenshot's when show casing your progress.
you don't want give away to much, at least game play wise. all & all very cool look.

[jonza]

ah man, that is cool. but it's best just use screenshot's when show casing your progress.
you don't want give away to much, at least game play wise. all & all very cool look.

Probably a good idea. No worries. It's going to be plenty different. I already redrew almost all of the graphics. Style is similar, but it sits on a 8x8 grid now and is a bit more like an actual C-64 game could look like. There's not a lot of the intended game play mechanics on the video -- beyond jumping and platforms anyway. It isn't going to be so "mario". Just needed something to do in the game so I threw in a bunch of coins and some projectiles for now.

[MrmediamanX]

it's cool ... all the best

[jonza]

Graphics and my game engine is working correctly with double wide pixels. Graphics are trying to emulate 4x8 multicolor character mode with some sprites. This scene would be using sprites for the player character, clouds and coins.

Trying to have a char set and sprite set that could actually fit in the VIC-II:s 16kb memory. Just found out there's no sprite mirroring or flipping registers in C64, and my palette swaps take space too. That ram runs out fast! I'm currently counting that I would need about 14.5kb.

Next up: Enemies

[jonza]

My game just turned into a series.  Other one is going to be a entry to the "Love letter to freebasic" -comp. It's going to be totally different,  a run 'n' gun game with aggressive punk as background music. Story wise it's a sequel, but the other deadline is earlier, so it looks like "Inner Demons" will technically be a prequel

Protagonist of both games will now be called "90's guy". He's traumatized by everything that has happened since 2001. Nineties Guy had a nervous brakedown and is currently stuck in a mental hospital tied with a straitjacket. Both games are set in his imagination. In Inner Demons he's dealing with his... Inner Demons. In the other one he still needs to deal with  the trauma that's caused by Visual Basic, .net, Object oriented programming etc. In his mind he's going to make things right and shoot him self some JS, CSS3 ad HTML5 with his finger.

My wife just showed me an amazing draft of a picture for the loading screen... So I guess the loading screen war is on

[3DzForMe]

Great work, another well presented game, still a month to go....